That’s right, you work out which town you’re playing. The fastest way to alienate any crowd is to go onstage, mistakenly blurt out a greeting meant for another town located more than 250 miles away and get booed by the crowd because you’re obviously a dick.

Perhaps someone should have pointed this out to Usher before his performance at the Radio 1 Big Weekend festival in Maidstone, where he bounded out onstage and bellowed “Hello Manchester!” to a chorus of boos. Usher should be thankful he got away that lightly. This was Maidstone, after all – he’s lucky a pregnant 12-year-old didn’t stab him in the eye with a sawn-off bottle of Bacardi Breezer.

The Radio 1 Big Weekend in Mote Park, Maidstone has now been and gone, and it was apparently a big success – organisers are claiming that it holds the record for Europe’s largest free-ticked event that’s only free because nobody in their right minds would ever actually pay to see The Kooks or Newton Faulkner in a festival hosted in part by Jo Whiley unless they were either idiots or being forced to by a jittery man with a gun.

But ’success’ is a funny term to define. That’s something that Usher knows only too well, because he never seems to be able to do anything with an absolute degree of success. When he was in Chicago, for example, Usher proved that even current popstars have the mental and physical endurance to perform live musical theatre night after night. At least until he got a bit of a sore throat and had to go home early.

Then there was his wedding to Tameka Foster. How did Usher celebrate the happiest day of his life? By cancelling it at the last minute, that’s how. And let’s not forget the birth of his first child, which Usher decided to mark by naming the baby Usher – a move of such soul-destroying egotism that we wouldn’t be surprised if Usher was actually a little bit disappointed that his wife hadn’t just given birth to a full-length gore-covered mirror.

So with this in mind, nobody should have really expected Usher’s set at Radio 1’s Big Weekend to go perfectly. Which is good, because it didn’t. Aside constant references to songs that weren’t written a week ago as ‘old classics’ as if he was referring to early Georgian antique bureaus when in reality they were mainly a bunch of identical R&B songs, Usher made the teensy mistake of forgetting where he was actually playing, as BBC News reports:

R&B star Usher left Kent festival goers unimpressed after shouting out “hello Manchester” to the packed crowd. The singer was opening Radio 1’s Big Weekend festival in Maidstone, Kent, when the blunder happened, prompting some audience members to boo.

To be fair, mixing up Maidstone and Manchester is an easy mistake to make – they’re only about 250 miles apart – plus they both begin with the letter M, so in retrospect it’s just as well that Usher didn’t yell “hello Melbourne” or “hello Marzipan.” But if he’d have paid some attention, Usher would have been able to tell the difference.

You see, a night out in Maidstone usually involves being bottled by a gang of lairy blokes outside Argos, while a night out in Manchester usually involves being shot by a gang of lairy blokes outside Argos. The difference is huge.

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Usher makes gaffe at Radio 1 gig - BBC